In the treatment of diseased vasculature, therapeutic agents have commonly been administered, typically as part of other interventional therapies such as angioplasty or stent delivery. Local, as opposed to systemic delivery, is a preferred method of treatment in that smaller total levels of medication are administered in comparison to systemic dosages, yet are concentrated at a specific site. As a result, local delivery produces fewer side effects and achieves more effective results.
A variety of methods and devices have been proposed for percutaneous drug delivery to a diseased region of the vasculature. For example, catheters having porous balloons can be used to deliver a therapeutic agent infused into the inflatable interior of the porous balloon and through the porous wall of the balloon. Alternatively, prostheses such as stents or other implantable devices provide for local drug delivery when coated or otherwise made to include a therapeutic agent which elutes from the implanted prosthesis. Another suggested method involves the use of one or more catheters having multiple balloons. The diseased region is isolated by inflating the balloons on either side of the diseased region, and the therapeutic agent is infused through a lumen of the catheter shaft and into the isolated diseased region from a delivery port on the catheter shaft located between the balloons.
One disadvantage with using a balloon to deliver drugs is that the balloons typically have a plain surface and therefore the contact to the artery wall is uniform and the whole endothelium receives the pressure of the balloon surface. Such contact causes endothelial damage/injury during the particular drug delivery procedure. Endothelial denudation (a loss of a surface layer) is associated with or representative of the endothelial damage caused by the balloon wall contact.
Another difficulty has been maximizing the amount of drug taken-up and retained at the diseased site, while minimizing the washout of large amounts of drug downstream of the treatment site. Drug washout reduces the efficiency of local intravascular drug delivery, in addition to causing potentially harmful systemic exposure to the drug. Therefore, it would be a significant advance to provide an improved device and method for providing therapy to a desired location within a patient's body lumen. Another difficulty with using a balloon is the limited treatment time resulting from ischemia.